Replaying the session afterwards

[Fairman]

Replaying the session afterwards

After the close, many scalpers scroll back through the chart. They see the moves they missed. The setups that would have worked. The entries that should have been bigger.

Hindsight is a poor teacher in this form. The chart shows the outcome of every setup, which makes the correct decision look obvious.

The distortion is called hindsight bias. It makes missed trades look easy and bad trades look foolish, when at the time of decision the information was incomplete.

A better review process covers only the trades actually taken, evaluated against the rules in force at the time. Missed trades are reviewed only if the rules said they should have been taken.

Replaying the chart bar by bar, with future candles hidden, restores some of the original uncertainty.

A structured review has three questions per trade: was the setup valid under the rules, was the execution clean, and was the management consistent with the plan. Outcome is deliberately left out. A losing trade that passed all three was a good trade, and a winning one that failed them was luck, which is hard to feel in the moment but easy to see in a table.

How different would the evaluation of the day's trades be if future price action were hidden during the review?